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Reflections on New York City
From: Columbia University
| By:
Kenneth T. Jackson |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Even among the great urban centers of today, New York City is still an exceptional metropolis. Writing in 2000, renowned historian Kenneth Jackson reflects on the history of New York City and urban America. Detractors may naysay crowds and the chance of crime, but Jackson sees a New York invigorated and made safer by its density, its ethnic mix and its layers of sights, shops, universities and sounds. |
 hether ascendant or in decline, New York has historically been a leader in trends affecting the nation and the world, from manufacturing and strong unions to shopping malls, suburbanization and controlled-access highways--even to the public transportation systems that originally allowed people to move out. What cities are really becoming at the dawn of the millennium are centers of entertainment, culture and command-and-control functions. |
In this respect, New York is both exceptional and exemplary; what others will see elsewhere often appears here first. |
Manufacturing and exchange
For most of human history, cities have been places less of manufacture than of exchange. In 1954, New York had more than a million manufacturing jobs and was the world's leading industrial center, in terms of value added by manufacturing. Those jobs have hemorrhaged in the past half-century; the city now has fewer than 200,000. |
Fifty years ago, New York was also the leading port in the world, with tens of thousands of workers unloading and loading ships. Few of those jobs are left, and they are mostly in New Jersey. Containerization, de-unionization and the rise of the ports of Long Beach (California), New Orleans, Houston, Baltimore and Seattle have eroded New York's once-dominant position. |
Yet New York has experienced job losses in the past and still managed to recover. In 1868, Singer Sewing Machine moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey; in the 1880s, Steinway Piano moved from Manhattan to Queens; in the 1950s, General Foods and IBM moved to Westchester. |
Manufacturing in cities actually turns out to have been a phenomenon that lasted only about a century. Other American cities are now experiencing the agonies of losing well-paying industrial jobs; what New York has done more effectively than many other cities is to replace them with other jobs, mostly in the service sector. |
Immigration revitalizing the economy
All you have to do to notice the demographic change of the last quarter-century is ride in a taxi or go to a newsstand, coffee shop or greengrocer. Each of those businesses has been, in a sense, taken over by a particular ethnic group. Immigrants have revitalized New York. |
New York's heterogeneity has been distinctive from other cities since its founding in the 1620s. The Dutch established New Amsterdam not for religious freedom, not to provide a safety valve for unhappy Dutchmen, but as a place to make money. This economic focus has an unattractive side--incredible discrepancies between the rich and the poor--but its positive side is a tolerance of newcomers. |
The bottom line in New York has always been a dollar sign; this diminishes attention to ethnicity. The stock market, for example, has been a major escalator for ethnic groups. New York was multicultural long before that term gained notoriety in the twentieth century. |
Urban space
The typical model of an American city is a donut, with little in the center except a few office buildings that are empty on weekends and evenings, and with activity concentrated on the fringes of the metropolitan area in malls and corporate office parks. |
In contrast, the center remains dominant in New York City. The development of Silicon Alley in lower Manhattan; the stunning performance of the stock market; the turnaround in real estate; the rebuilding of the South Bronx and large parts of Brooklyn; and the drop in crime--which makes New York, according to criteria that are hard to fudge (e.g., homicide and automobile theft), now the safest major city in the United States--all these factors are encouraging young Americans to rediscover this city. |
The current generation of college students essentially grew up in shopping malls and realizes better than the rest of us how boring such places are. If you've been in one or two, you've been in them all. Meanwhile, there is something distinctive about a city street with lively sidewalks. |
People are coming back to New York, Boston, San Francisco, Georgetown and Baltimore precisely because they lack the blandness and retail uniformity of the suburbs. Surely our civilization would be diminished if everyone went to a shopping center and bought all their clothes from the Gap. And even though Manhattan now has more Gaps and Banana Republics per square mile than anywhere else on the planet, no one could ever mistake Broadway for a shopping mall. |
Safety and ecology
Americans have historically associated high density with danger, helped in no small measure by Hollywood movies and television news. But in fact the reverse is true. New York is safer than other cities not because of the homicide rate but because Gotham's automobile death rate is the lowest in the United States. What a crowded environment does do is increase the happy things of life: the social diversity, the numbers of potential partners you can meet, the variety of movies, plays, concerts and restaurants. |
Renewed interest in cities may also be driven by ecologic concerns. When we think of environmental responsibility, we tend to think of those living close to nature in a rural, semirural or suburban setting, but in fact the most "environmentally correct" Americans are Manhattanites, because they use less energy than other Americans. They use public transportation or walk rather than drive. They live in smaller apartments that have warm walls, ceilings or floors adjacent to other apartments, so those walls don't have to be heated. (A single-family detached house gets the cold from six directions and costs much more to heat.) By virtue of a high-density lifestyle, New Yorkers tread most lightly on the land, which in spite of well-publicized garbage and pollution problems is exactly the reverse of public perception. |
The university as the mind of the city
Universities make an important impact on cities, not only through the billions they spend or the people they train and employ but also by studying and publicizing urban issues. For example, Charles Abrams, who taught urban planning at Columbia University's architecture school, was the first person to blow the whistle on the federal government's systematic discrimination against city residents by devaluing urban-pattern neighborhoods in issuing mortgages. |
There is a long-standing American bias against cities; we subsidize things that benefit the middle class, like home ownership and suburban roads, and do much less for urban schools and infrastructure. Scholars can point out the ways cities could thrive if the playing field were more level, as it is in so many other cultures. |
Potential areas for urban research include the impact of immigration; the question of safety (is Jane Jacobs, a noted urban theorist, right about "eyes on the street," suggesting that a higher-density environment is safer?); the study of creativity and of the tendency of cities to be the natural habitat for the unusual people who make major changes to civilization; the history of public administration--especially public housing, which is a great success in New York, contrary to the images of projects elsewhere being abandoned or blown up; and the problems of the infrastructure, both the engineering challenges and the political challenge of maintaining facilities despite resource limits. |
Cities, by definition, require us to depend on each other; they require clean streets, functioning schools and responsive fire departments, and paying for these things (especially in a political system skewed against taxation) requires the creative, intelligent solutions that research can provide. |
As William Faulkner said, "The past isn't dead, it isn't even past yet." The hand of the past imposes limits on the future--especially in New York, where centuries-old decisions about where to build subways or bridges shape the decisions we can make today. In 1997, for the first time in the history of the planet, more people lived in cities than outside them. As our naturally social species increasingly congregates in urban habitats, this movement offers historians and other scholars ample opportunities to predict, and possibly help shape, our future. |
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